Author: Paris Marx, Tim Schwab

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss why the story we hear about Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t reflect their real impact on education and health around the world.

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Bill Gates was pied in Belgium in 1999 and made fun of on The Simpsons.
• You can watch highlights from Gates’ deposition in the antitrust trial on YouTube.
• Gates had a reputation about questionable and inappropriate conduct toward women below him in the workplace.
• Aaron Gordon wrote there’s an adage that “everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about.”
• In 2008, the head of the World Heath Organization’s malaria program criticized the growing dominance of the Gates Foundation in the research area.

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Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss how Bill Gates wields his wealth to shape public policy, the many conflicts of interest of Bill and his Foundation, and how legitimate criticism of power is being positioned as conspiracy.

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose recent work on the Gates Foundation has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Review of Journalism, and the British Medical Journal. Follow Tim on Twitter as @TimothyWSchwab.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Tim wrote about the Gates Foundation’s conflicts of interest, in particular during the pandemic. He also wrote about how Gates’ funding of media and health data produces accountability and transparency problems.
• Paris had a viral thread about Gates’ intervention in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, after which an interview said it was a conspiracy theory.
• After getting the rights to the Oxford vaccine, AstraZeneca ran into trouble in clinical trials.
• The Associated Press found three factories in Bangladesh alone that could be producing vaccines if patent protections were waived.
• The Mail and Guardian in South Africa published an article on Bill Gates’ complicity in vaccine apartheid and the author’s Twitter account was locked for tweeting about it.
• In 2015, Thomas Piketty talked to the BBC about the problems with billionaire philanthropy.

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